Reviews OWE & Fringe Published 12 July 2012

Mottled Lines

Orange Tree Theatre ⋄ 10th - 14th July 2012

Riot acts.

Ben Monks

One of Archie W Maddocks’ bones to pick with society – and to which he attributes a fear and unknowing that sparked last summer’s riots – is also the most frustrating thing about his debut full-length play Mottled Lines: people don’t talk to each other.

Over 95 minutes Mottled Lines presents a cycle of monologues from five archetypal characters, a cross-section of the London that descended into violence and looting: Silver Tongue, a Cameronesque prime minister who talks in empty phrases of fixing what’s broken and repairing the land; The Fight, a disgruntled East End policeman; The Sparkle, obsessed with hair, nails and cosmetics in a life lacking any more substantial grounds for aspiration; The Wolf, a disaffected civil servant; and The Fear The Thug, a Nietzsche and Malcolm X-reading hoodie.

Maddocks’ approach combines the Tricycle’s production of The Riots‘ forensic desire for clarity with the social sympathies of Saturday Night, Sunday Morning. His writing’s strongest when probing the causality of last summer’s violence, and he’s not afraid to tie up his characters in brilliant knottiness as he examines identity, disaffection and social cohesion: The Fight’s paradoxical philosophy envisages both a societal mainframe in which each individual is an equal part – a bird part of a flock bigger than itself – and a structure that can nonetheless single out those with cop badges as above the norm, in positions of protection and respect. And then there’s The Fear The Thug, a young, hooded black man who presupposes that the world’s against him; bristling with anger and assumed prejudice he bemoans a society that regards all that look like him as thuggish, voiceless and violent, that spends more time trying to fathom Shakespeare and Joyce than its own population; before he himself gives up, finding his words ignored and his gun more audible.

None of the five accept responsibility, either for the events of the riots or the societal malaise that gave rise to them; blame is always apportioned elsewhere, and all four men eventually resort to their pistols while Sparkle simply resigns herself to a life of violence. It’s a fundamentally pessimistic thesis – if Maddocks is right then the future is a bleak, self-perpetuating cycle of violence and distrust with little scope for redemption.

But for all the energy and audience eye-balling of Henry Bell’s production, a string of soliloquies can only take us so far; and ultimately Mottled Lines’ structure is dramatically unrewarding. A second round of monologues delivers diminishing returns on the first, which themselves needed a bit of a trim; and there seems a missed opportunity for Maddocks to move the conversation beyond simply restating important but essentially unsurprising truisms of class, race, outrage and identity. It’s a commendable start, but the production feels a few development weeks’ away from the truly impactful debut it might have been.

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Ben Monks is a contributor to Exeunt Magazine

Mottled Lines Show Info


Directed by Henry Bell

Written by Archie W Maddocks

Link http://orangetreetheatre.co.uk/

Running Time 1 hr 35 mins (no interval)

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